Tom Atlee on the struggle between horizontal and vertical solutions

To the extent we fail to develop those (horizontal) capacities and continue to simply rely on the services and controls of dominant and dominating (vertical) politics and economics, we tie ourselves to the painful collapse of those unsustainable systems.

Excerpted from Tom Atlee:

“The report from the Guardian UK describes accelerating government and military planning for major civil unrest caused by climate change, energy shocks, and economic crises. The recently highlighted NSA surveillance – with its engagement of both government and corporate players – is a part of this. Another part, highlighted here, is the domestic use of the military.

I see this as an example of the power-over forces attempting to maintain control – articulated by them as “government stability” and “domestic order” – as crises and technological developments undermine the capacities of centralized rule and management, as covered by my recent review of THE END OF POWER
http://www.tomatleeblog.com/?p=175326503 .

This emerging narrative of behind-the-scenes government fears and preparations increases the importance and urgency of developing power-with and systemic power at the grassroots – that is, our ability to satisfy our authentic human needs and to pursue our highest aspirations TOGETHER. That broad bottom-up capacity generates peace, justice, democracy, the abundance of healthy economics, and sustainability. The ability to exercise that capacity together at appropriate scales lies at the heart of the world many of us are trying to bring about. We have collectively created countless resources to promote it.

In a world of rapid change and challenge, top-down systems can only successfully play a subsidiary role. Collaborative, distributed, networked peer-to-peer and bottom-up systems must predominate because the complexity of “the rapids of change” overwhelms top-down management. But we need far more development of our power-with capacities if we wish to generate services remotely comparable to the top-down order that is approaching collapse.

To the extent we develop those capacities we will be able to minimize the suffering and destruction that are an intrinsic aspect of any transition of the scale we currently face. Our efforts to employ those capacities will often be met with resistance from power-over forces (such as the efforts of multinationals to block community initiatives to control their own food and water, or of banks to get non-profit user-owned credit unions taxed, or the suppression of the Occupy movement). The creativity, courage and engagement required to deal successfully with such opposition is part of the capacity-building development we need.

To the extent we fail to develop those capacities and continue to simply rely on the services and controls of dominant and dominating politics and economics, we tie ourselves to the painful collapse of those unsustainable systems.“

WRITTEN BY

Michel Bauwens

Michel Bauwens is the founder and president of the P2P Foundation and works in collaboration with a global group of researchers in the exploration of peer production, governance, and property. Bauwens travels extensively giving workshops and lectures on P2P and the Commons as emergent paradigms and the opportunities they present to move towards a post-capitalist world.
In the first semester of 2014, Bauwens was research director of the floksociety.org which produced the first integrated Commons Transition Plan for the government of Ecuador, in order to create policies for a 'social knowledge economy'.
In January 2015 CommonsTransition.org was launched. Commons Transition builds on the work of the FLOK Society and features newly revised and updated, non-region specific versions of these policy documents. Commons Transition aims toward a society of the Commons that would enable a more egalitarian, just, and environmentally stable world. He is a founding member of the Commons Strategies Group, with Silke Helfrich and David Bollier, who have organised major global conferences on the commons and economics.